NBER Working Papers and Publications

Because uncertainty is high in bad times, investors find it harder to assess firm prospects and, hence, should value analyst output more. However, higher uncertainty makes analysts’ tasks harder so it is unclear if analyst output is more valuable in bad times. We find that, in bad times, analyst revisions have a larger stock-price impact, earnings forecast errors per unit of uncertainty fall, reports are more frequent and longer, and the impact of analyst output increases more for harder-to-value firms. These results are consistent with analysts working harder and investors relying more on analysts in bad times.

Not all stock recommendation changes are equal. In a sample constructed to minimize the impact of confounding news, relatively few analyst recommendation changes are influential in the sense that they impact investors' beliefs about a firm in a way that could be noticed in that firm's stock returns. More than one-third of the stock-price reactions to analyst recommendation changes have the wrong sign and only approximately 10% have significant stock-price reactions at the 5% level using an extended market model. We find that the probability of an influential recommendation is higher for leader analysts, star analysts, away-from-consensus revisions, revisions issued contemporaneously with earnings forecasts, analysts with greater relative experience, and those with more accurate earnings es...